T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

From inside I could hear confused movement: shuffling feet, probing hands. A light went on, a voice called out. Boom, boom, boom , I hammered. Then the porch light, mustard yellow. A hanging planter materialized, reeling past my left ear; a ceramic dwarf looked up at me quizzically. “Okay, okay,” came the voice from within, “enough already.” I stopped pounding. There was the sound of lock and key, a bolt sliding back.

I spread my bandaged hands, lifted my shoulders in a deprecatory shrug: I was ready to capitulate.

Petra stood in the doorway, her face soft with sleep, a dragon-splashed kimono pinched round her throat. There was a look of utter stupefaction in her eyes, a look of bewilderment and incomprehension, as if she’d been wakened from a sound sleep and asked to name the fifty volumes of the Harvard Classics or the capitals of all the countries of the South China Sea, beginning with Borneo. A square-headed cat brushed up against her bare ankles and then froze, blinking up at me mistrustfully.

I’d twisted my face into a strained grin and fixed it there until I must have looked like a funeral-home director in a novelty shop. Since I couldn’t think of anything to say, I grinned wider.

“Felix?” she said. It was a question.

I nodded.

This exchange was succeeded by an ever-lengthening moment of silence, during which I struggled to think of some witty opener, the mot that would break the ice and precipitate a mutual flood of verbal good will, while Petra’s look went from puzzlement to a glare of irate recognition. She was studying my sorry hair, soiled face, scorched clothes and mummy-wrapped hands, recalling no doubt that the last time she’d laid eyes on me my behavior had been eccentric to the point of offense, and that our only communication since had been my mad, interminable, demanding, love-struck letters, the tone of which made Notes from Underground seem the tranquil recollections of a lucid mind. Behind her I could see buffed linoleum, a ceramic pig devouring ceramic corn, more plants. “I’m sorry,” I began, staring down at my feet and losing my train of thought: a ragged hole the size of a silver dollar had eaten through the canvas of my right sneaker, dissolving the sweatsock beneath and exposing the serried rank of my upper toe joints. Stiff, naked, red, the toes looked as if they should be cracked and dipped in drawn butter.

The cat nuzzled Petra’s ankles. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the oscillating planter had begun to lose momentum, winding down like a hypnotist’s watch. In the space of time I’d been standing on her doorstep groping for words, a legion of tired old men had breathed their last, interest had accrued, vows been exchanged, and the worldwide army of hollow-eyed widows had brewed enough tea to fill all the petroleum storage tanks in Houston. Finally Petra stepped back and held the door open. “My God,” she said, “what was it — a car crash?”

I told her everything.

We sat at the kitchen table amid a welter of corn plants, rubber plants, dracaena, coleus and African violets, sipping Postum and watching the night sky fall away to tatters in the east, while I told her about the model hole, about the bear, about the half million that had gone through more permutations than the federal arts budget. I told her about Gesh, Phil, Vogelsang, Sapers, Marlon, about the rain, the heat, the rattlesnakes, airplanes, poison oak. I told her about the fire.

The sky was pale, the trees beyond the windows brightening as if a filter had been lifted, when I closed out my apologia with the harrowing tale of the hospital and Jerpbak’s latest victims. “I threw his keys in the woods,” I said, my voice lifting with the memory of it.

Petra got up from the table and put the kettle on again. “More Postum?”

Postum. It tasted like boiled cinders. “Sure,” I said.

I’d been talking for over an hour. I’d begun hesitantly, guiltily, alluding obliquely to my conduct at the heifer festival and then staring down at the spectacle of my clasped hands. “I’ve been keeping something from you,” I said. If she’d looked angry, tired, sympathetic and apprehensive by degrees as she’d opened the door, let me in and offered me a seat, now she gave me a look of concentrated attention: the enigma was about to be unraveled. Yes, I’d insulted her friends, deserted her on our first and only date, plagued her with rambling letters and appeared on her doorstep at five in the morning — but there were extenuating circumstances. I was a nice guy — trustworthy, loyal, sane and sympathetic — really, I was. “We’re not up here for our health,” I said.

Her laugh surprised me. She reached out to pat my bandaged hand. “I can see that,” she said.

I acknowledged her point with a tight, rueful smile, then lowered my head again. “We’re growing pot.”

Petra had looked at me curiously, as if in that moment I’d emerged from darkness to light, as if I’d molted, sloughed off a strange skin and metamorphosed into the familiar. “So that’s it,” she said, smiling a wide, beautiful, close-lipped smile. “I should have guessed. And I thought you were schizophrenic or something. Or married.” She was watching me over the rim of her cup, her eyes flaring with amusement. “Remember Teddy? And Sarah?” I nodded. I wanted to get it over with, give her all the sorry details, I wanted to justify myself, I wanted absolution. “They’ve got a patch too. So does Alice.” She gestured at the dark windowpane. “I’ve even got five plants myself, buried out there in a clump of pampas grass. Everybody grows around here — it’s no big thing.”

This was my moment of confession, yes, my moment of humiliation, my scourging — but she’d gone too far. Did she think I was some piker, some weekend dirtbagger, some Teddy? “I’m talking two thousand plants.”

She shrugged. “Alice knows a guy up in Humboldt with twice that. He’s got his own twin-engine plane. He even contributed to the sheriff’s reelection fund last year.”

What could I say? We were losers, schmucks, first-class bone-heads. We weren’t paying off politicians or reconnoitering the skies — we were too busy dodging our own shadows and setting fire to storage sheds. Chastened, I dropped any pretense of coming on like the macho dope king and gave her the story straight. I described rampant paranoia, xenophobia, self-enforced isolation. I told her of sleepless nights, panic at the first sputter of an internal-combustion engine, suspicion that ate like acid at the fabric of quotidian existence. I told her how Vogelsang appeared and disappeared like a wood sprite, how Phil slept with his sneakers on, how Dowst would insist that we change the hundred-dollar bills he gave us for supplies before we bought groceries, on the theory that only dope farmers would flash a hundred-dollar bill in the checkout line. She was laughing. So was I. It was a comedy, this tale I was telling her, slapstick. We were ridiculous, we were cranks, sots, quixotic dreamers — Ponce de LeéoAn, Percival Lowell and Donald Duck all rolled in one. When I’d told her everything — the whole sad laughable tale — she’d said “Poor Felix,” and patted my hand again. Then she’d asked if I wanted more Postum.

Now, as I watched her at the stove, the first splash of sun ripening the window and firing the kimono with color, I felt at peace for the first time in months. Annealed by the fire, shriven by confession, I rolled the cup in my clumsy hands and felt like Saint Anthony emerging from the tomb. I’d revealed my festering secret and nothing had happened. Petra hadn’t run howling from the room or telephoned the police, the DEA hadn’t burst in and demanded my surrender, the stars were still in their firmament and the seas lapped the shores. No big thing, she’d said. She was right. For the moment at least I’d been able to put things in perspective, separate myself from the grip of events, see the absurdity of what we’d come to. If the best stories — or the funniest, at any rate — derive from suffering recollected in tranquility then this was hilarious. In telling it, I’d defused it, neutralized the misery through retrospection, made light of the woe. My trip to Belize? Oh, yes, I lost eight layers of skin to sunburn while snorkeling off the barrier reef, turned yellow from jaundice, got mugged outside the courthouse and couldn’t get a grip on my bowels for a month. Ha-ha-ha.